Steampunk Rifle update

I've made some progress with my steampunk rifle, some good progress. I feel like I could have shaved off a day or two but school work gets in the way sometimes. I have the high poly completely finished and right now I'm working on the retopo. It's shouldn't take more than a day to finish that and the UVs. If I'm lucky I'll get the bakes done tomorrow too, we'll see how productive I can be...

This is the only project I'm working on at the moment but by this time next week it should be completely finished. I may take a break from creating assets and start learning some new programs. I mentioned last week I was playing around with Word Machine and I intend to dive further into it once I have this finished. It's nice creating assets that actually look halfway decent and I think these last three pieces could be portfolio worthy with some touch-ups. I know that the more I create, the better I get so in time I will definitely come back to the helmet and totem pole to give them the attention they need for showing off.

Here are a few snapshots of my rifle I took inside of Maya:

Recent Progress

I don't want to let this blog fall by the way side but progress has been a little slow. At least progress that one can show. I've been learning a lot about workflow and speed. I made this medieval jousting helm a few days ago to see how fast I can run through the asset making process. I have varying colors that I felt looked pretty good. Not sure which one I would like to use but I do like the green and black ones. I focused on trying to get the right iron feel to it. I used Substance Painter to texture this again. I'm enjoying it the more I use it. I will end up having to purchase Substance Designer in the future if I want to be able to create my own materials and effects however. For now I'm content with the built in presets since I'm still getting a handle on it.

I'm taking the time to fully understand each section (modeling, sculpting, retopo/UV, baking, texturing, and rendering). I'm still not too comfortable with the rendering aspects and final presentation of game assets just yet but I guess I'm okay with that as long as I keep learning something from each project. That's why I'm not pumping out assets every other day like I will be once I get a job.

I also started working on a steampunk rifle from this concept:

I'm still working on the blockout/proportions right now so I don't have much to show for it. Maybe in a few days... 

Another thing I've been digging into is a procedural height map generator for making terrain. WorldMachine allows to you create great looking landscapes that you can customize to your liking and then bring them into a game engine to texture and show off. It's a little complicated but essentially you input a bunch of settings for your terrain and it then generates a height map (a greyscale bitmap that uses the shades of grey to differentiate elevation). It saves a lot of time from trying to sculpt it all by hand and can give some really nice results. Again, I don't have anything to show for it but it's what I'm learning at the moment.

Photo dump!

Usually I wait until Monday or Tuesday to post but since I'm done with this piece I might as well show it off a bit: Some renders using Marmoset Tooldbag 2:

And below are my texture sets for the totem pole. I used a separate one for the base and kind of threw that together in 15 minutes. Going clockwise are my normals, ambient occlusion, albedo, and roughness maps.

I don't know if I want to get some nicer renders for my portfolio but I feel this will definitely go in it when the time comes. Now on to my next project! Something hard surface....

Texturing started

After a rather brutal week of baking normals and AO maps I finally have something to show for it. Learning how to properly bake (render) a normal map inside of xNormal is an endeavor in and of itself. I had to do a LOT of reading and watching of videos. I must have spent over 20 hours on just baking my maps for this thing. But now that I've gone through that I now have SO much more knowledge. I made sure to fully understand all the settings and comprehend the logistics of what's actually happening behind the scenes. For those readers out there that are curious what I'm talking when I say normal map here is a quick video that explains it pretty well in 2 minutes.

Today I finally was able to start texturing. Once I got going I couldn't actually stop. It's a strange feeling sitting down at the computer when the sun is coming up and the next thing you know it's dark out. I made a lot of progress though. I used an awesome new program called Substance Painter. It's a 3D painting program similar to Photoshop but is made specifically for texturing game assets. I have really only scratched the surface of it's capabilities yet but I feel like I've done a pretty good job for only working with it for one day. It feels great to see some progress after a week's worth of headaches....

Anyway here are a few screen grabs inside of the program:

I'm not done with it yet. I got most of the colors in there but I want to spend another couple of days working on some of the finer details adding scratches, dirt, grime, etc. I see some errors I made already but nothing a few short brush strokes won't fix! Until next time.